


Blondes

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Marci Stahl appreciation club, blondes do have more fun if your idea of fun is taking names and kicking ass, lawyering, marci stahl has a heart, she just hides it well, the intern-year dinosaurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 09:59:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6561976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Karen punches a guy in the face, gets fired from Union Allied, walks into a bar and meets Marci Stahl. Together, they kick ass. Later, Karen meets Matt and Foggy under vastly different circumstances (featuring a return of the intern-year dinosaurs, which were too beautiful to consign to obscurity).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blondes

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was supposed to be a companion piece to Jurisprudence to explain how Karen doesn't die just because Matt is a homeless dumpster-ninja instead of a lawyer, but I sort of forgot that halfway through and didn't write Matt as AU homeless Matt, and then couldn't be bothered to go back and fix it. And all of them working together to investigate Union Allied/Consolidated whatever wouldn't work because I implied that they were still at Landman and Zack, which: conflict of interest, since they're clients. Ah, well. 
> 
> TLDR: There are plot holes here, be careful where you step

The nice thing about working for a giant corporate conglomeration is that it’s always possible to be working. Karen finds this out. You’d be surprised at the number of people who sleep at their desks, or maybe you wouldn’t be. 

They sleep at their desks, under their desks, sleep in those plush armchairs that are meant for clients. If you’re not too tall, you can take two armchairs, those leather wingbacks, and push them together, till their arms touch. You can tuck in your knees and wrap yourself in a blanket that you brought from home, and the curves of the arms and slopes of the backs will hold you like a cradle. You can angle the chairs so that if anyone walks past a dark office, it looks like no one is there at all.  When you wake four or five hours later (when the sun decides to spit pale light over the city and into the 21st floor) you can re-apply your makeup; the concealer under your eyes can be a mask and the careful angles of kohl that line your eyes can be warpaint. Your mouth is a slash of red that leaves prints on your second, third, fourth cup of coffee.

You can do this, if you don’t want to leave work, or if you just don’t want to go home.

 

Karen meets Marci a week before Christmas. Karen walks out of the Union Allied holiday party and keeps walking until her gold stilettos blister her feet. She keeps walking until she can feel the tack of blood in her shoes. Then she walks into a bar.

It’s Josie’s; Karen’s not quite a regular, but she’s got enough familiarity that Josie takes one look at her walking in, blood-shod, and has a whisky on the bar before she’s across the room. Karen doesn’t realize that her hands are shaking until she picks up the glass, sends a little slop of liquor burning down her knuckles. And then, oh, she notices that her knuckles are split. _Fuck.,_ she breathes, and downs the glass.   

Josie slides a couple napkins across the bar, asks, “You okay, kid?” There’s actual concern rolling in the gravel of her voice, and Karen thinks she must look pretty fucked up to earn that.

“Not really. The region’s top sales rep can’t keep his hands to himself, drunk or sober. So I broke his nose and lost my job.” Her voice is steady, like she’s reporting on the weather, and not the structural collapse of her life. It was a reflex more than a choice, his hands gliding down the small of her back and his mouth slurring some cliche, and her hands curling into fists. 

“Good for you. I hope you gave him a knee to the nuts while you were at it. Some asshole tries that shit in here, I got a shotgun behind the bar.” Karen manages a crooked smile. 

 

The woman leaning against the bar next to her makes a noise in the back of her throat and Karen looks up. She’s ice-blonde, sheathed in dove-grey tailoring, looking at her vodka-on-the-rocks like it did something to personally offend her.  “Her next one is on me,” she tells Josie, tosses two twenties on the bar, turns to the plaid-shirted guy hunched over a beer next to her and says “So is yours, if you give the lady your seat.”

Karen takes the seat and the drink. (because, why not.)

“You’re bleeding on your shoes.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, just straddling the line of boredom.

“Yeah.” Karen licks the whiskey off her split knuckles.

“I suppose someone should make soothing noises and ask if you’re okay or want the cops or to phone a friend. But since the answer to all of those is obviously no, and my booty call flaked because he has pneumonia-- don’t give me that look, Josie, I had half a gallon of spicy chicken pho delivered from that place he likes, sometimes I pretend I have a heart, for old times’ sake --  I propose that we skip that bullshit, and have a girls’ night.”   The woman’s out of place, sleek and polished in a sea of plaid and neon and sticky floors. So is Karen, gold stilettos and a red sweater dress.

“I think that a girl’s night is the sort of thing that you do with … friends.”

“I don’t have friends, so here we are.” Karen stares at her, and she sighs. 

“Alternately, you can tell me about your handsy sales rep so that I can file suit for wrongful termination and sexual harassment and get some vindictive pleasure from ruining his pitiful life.” She extends a well-manicured hand. “My name is Marci Stahl, and I’d like to represent you. But first, you need another drink.” And Karen’s ready to have another drink. She’s ready to let someone else take the wheel, cause she’s been white-knuckling it for a while now. So she gives Marci her hand. 

 

***

 

It’s months later, after Marci’s extracted an overwhelming sum from Union Allied. She did it with terrifying efficiency, heels clicking along the tiling of glossy boardrooms, never entering court and never needing to. Karen spent a month and a half in Marci’s offices for the case, she knows Union Allied from the inside, and it’s not the first time that rep’s let his hands wander, and he’s not the only one, and that constitutes a pattern of behavior, that constitutes negligence; they had enough ammunition when they’d started, but Karen’s got semtex and a fuse. After that, she never left. Marci left her a contract when she gave her the paperwork for the final settlement.  _ Personal assistant _ , such a harmless title for a job that can cover such a multitude of sins. Marci’s slipped it in there, like a  _ do-you-like-me, yes-no-maybe _ ; like it gives her plausible deniability of vulnerability, of wanting to hold onto anything. Karen reads it all and signs on all the dotted lines. Karen checks  _ yes _ on that box and Marci’s smile shifts from victory smirk to something softer when she gets to those pages, and Karen thinks she may have made the right choice that night in Josie’s.

The reps from Union Allied come in, one last time; Marci and Karen meet them in the lobby. They tell Karen, patronizing, that she’s made the right choice, that it’s a clean slate. She doesn’t tell them that it’s not the first and won’t the last time that she’s broken a man’s nose, or that there’s no such thing as a clean slate. Marci smiles ( _ she bares her teeth _ ) as she tells them that unless they plan on paying by fifteen-minute intervals for the time, they can take their condescending bullshit, take the papers, and leave. 

Karen doesn’t need the job, not for the money anyway, won’t need a paycheck for a while, even after Marci takes her cut. But she’s good at it, she’s got a talent, she’s got a way of finding the seams when she’s digging, and Marci likes that. Karen likes doing the things that she’s good at. People have a way of underestimating them, all that blonde hair and those blue eyes. They have a way of thinking that it means they’re soft or that they’re dumb, like there’s an inverse relationship between the height of their heels and their IQ (they forget that the stiletto was, first and foremost, a weapon). Karen doesn’t think she’ll ever get tired of the way that their faces go slack, shift from confidence to shock, flicker into rage, before they realize that they’ve been cornered, or gutted. 

Everyone has a weakness, and she’s very, very good at finding it.  She knows where people hide their secrets, she’s got experience, and there’s only so many ways you can bury a thing, and no way to do it without leaving a trail.  And Marci? Marci’s very good at going for the jugular, Karen knows she’s a predator, the way she smiles with all her teeth when she knows she’s won.

When Karen moves into Marci’s office, amidst all the dotted lines, a desk for her appears out of some back store-room. It’s a week or two, before she lets herself put anything of her own into the drawers (pens and mascara and no photos, ever). When she gets into the back of the top drawer, though, she finds a set of tiny plastic dinosaurs there, a whole little ecosystem in a forest of dried-out ballpoint pens. When she shows them to Marci; the half-second of hesitation between Marci seeing them, and telling her  _ to throw them out if you want  _ tells Karen that there’s something there. Marci knows that she’s seen it, Marci knows that Karen knows how to pull that thread if she wants, but Karen doesn’t pull and she doesn’t push. So Karen arranges them on the back corner of her desk, an alcove where you can only see them if you’re standing behind the desk. She presses a fingertip along their little spines, when she’s thinking, rearranges them to act out scenes of harmony or impending doom, depends on her mood. The day after she signs her employment contract as Marci’s personal assistant, Marci comes in with a latte and a fern, leaves them on the desk like she’s being casual, but the fern fronds offer a tiny forest for the dinosaurs in their alcove. Karen smiles, and drinks her latte. 

Then the darkest, dirtiest corners of Hell’s Kitchen go up in flames, and Union Allied goes down, not a ship hitting an iceberg in the night but a vessel with a hull that’s been rotting out for a long time.  

The lawyers of Nelson and Murdock show up, out of place in all this steel and glass.  

“Foggy-bear! Karen, this is Franklin Nelson, who abandoned  _ all this _ to fight for truth, justice, and the American way; as you can tell from his wardrobe, that doesn’t pay particularly well. He’s convinced  that representing the people of Hell’s Kitchen is more important than being able to afford a decent tie. And this is Matt Murdock, who convinced Foggy that representing the people of Hell’s Kitchen was more important than being able to afford a decent tie.” Marci’s tone is all lip gloss and acid, covering something that, in a normal person, would skew closer to fondness. 

“Don’t believe it, Foggy, your tie looks great. Marci likes it and is lying about it. ” says Matt, and Marci rolls her eyes, and dodges the obvious  _ how would you know _ response, because, ugh, Matt’s not wrong. 

“That sounds very noble,” Karen says.

“She means moronic,” Marci clarifies. “Boys, this is Karen. Stay on her good side, unless you have a deathwish. She used to work for Union Allied, but her NDA doesn’t apply to Confederated Global Investments because their lawyers are, thankfully, idiots. You want help on the Union Allied, Fisk thing? Let’s get to work.” 

They pull up chairs by Marci’s desk, and Foggy’s eyes light up when he glances back and sees the dinosaurs. 

“Aw, Matt, the dinos are here, I thought for sure that they got chucked when we left our internships. Well,  _ left  _ is putting it nicely, you know what I mean, the whole bagel fiasco of 2013. Karen is their new overlord, shielding them from apocalypse. Karen, may I touch them?” And Foggy  _ asks, _ which Karen appreciates in a man, appreciates in anyone. She is a magnanimous overlord, and she permits it.  He picks one up, the stegosaurus, puts it into Matt’s hand so that he can run his fingertips over it like there’s a novel written in braille in those tiny spines.   He cradles it there in his palms as Foggy runs through what Nelson and Murdock have found so far, reams of documents and loose threads, some of them overlapping what Karen and Marci have already discovered. Karen paces through the evidence, photos and paper trails and classified documents, murders and payoffs,  as Marci pins them together with the legal implications, lists of charges. They have enough, they’ll have more than enough, once they connect the dots, but enough isn’t good enough. It needs to be airtight, so that Fisk goes down with it, and that’s going to take a hell of a lot of work. 

 

Six or seven hours later, Foggy and Karen go downstairs to pick up Thai takeout, because they’re going to be there all night and pad thai makes most things better. Foggy rubs at his temples and mumbles,   “I sometimes forget how terrifyingly brilliant she is.”

“It happens, sometimes. The advantage of being underestimated is that she usually uses the opening to dismantle her opponent.”

“I know.” He winces, and adds, “Sorry, we used to date in law school.” Karen doesn’t blink, and he looks surprised. “She told you?” 

“No. I didn’t ask. But I’m not blind, or stupid.” He runs a hand through his hair, and looks at her again.

“People underestimate you, too, don’t they.” He sighs. “I suppose they underestimate all of us. You, and Marci, and Matt, because he’s blind and nice… and me, because what kind of lawyer is named Foggy and looks like--” he waves his hand around the checked shirt and dinosaur tie. 

“If Marci let you in here, my money is that you’re good at what you do.” Foggy snorts, and asks,

“You trust her?” 

Karen laughs.  Foggy wants to know if she trusts Marci, because he doesn’t. Karen does. 

“As much as I trust anyone.” Which is not an answer, really, but is the truth. The elevator opens and they’re in the lobby. Foggy’s quiet the ride back up, wanting to ask something, or warn her, but he’s biting it back, which she appreciates. 

 

Feelings are messy, and Marci doesn’t like messy, doesn’t like things that she’s not good at. If it’s a fight, she can win it, but these are limnal things, balancing acts. Karen suspects Matt and Marci have quite a bit in common, the things that drew them to the law-- the law is a matter of knots and webs, things that you can untangle and use to your advantage, words that you can turn into traps to spring. The law, for all its order and codifications, is a thing that you can use as armor or as a weapon,  depending on how quick your mind is, how quick your tongue is. But armor and weapons, whatever they’re woven of, aren’t an advantage when it comes to relationships. 

The problem is that Foggy thinks that Marci is something other than what she is, thinks she’s untrustworthy because he doesn’t understand it. Karen wonders if he misunderstands Matt, too, if he realizes that there might be teeth and claws under that nice suit, summa cum laude at Columbia doesn’t come easy, it takes a hunger that makes you willing to take a certain amount of suffering. But people see what they want to see. She’s only known them, in person, for seven hours, it’s true, but she’s thorough, she’s read Matt’s court transcripts and his written arguments, and there’s something there that’s more brittle and thorny than mild manners and a local-boy made good. 

She wonders, if she told him to look a little closer, whether he would; she thinks if he stays close enough he’s going to get burned somewhere down the line. Karen knows she’s going to get hurt sooner or later, but she sees it coming, she’s survived enough that she’s got a certain amount of scar tissue. But maybe she’s wrong, about Matt. Maybe she’s right. But it doesn’t matter, right now, so she smiles and tucks her hair behind one ear and asks Foggy where he grew up, even though she already knows; she’s done her homework. He tells her that he was supposed to be a butcher, waves his hands as he talks about his family, and there’s an earnestness to him that almost makes her hurt. She supposes that Foggy’s had to fight too, to hang onto that in a place like this. 

 

They eat around a folding table that they’ve commandeered. The entire floor is abandoned except for them; even the interns have given in to sleep, Marci and Karen leave their stilettos abandoned by the desks and pad across the carpeting in bare feet, and at the table Matt finally loosens his tie, lets his shoulders slacken by degrees. There’s the quiet click of chopsticks; until Foggy starts complaining that Matt shouldn’t be better at using chopsticks than he is; Marci throws a plastic fork at him to shut him up. Something loosens, and shared exhaustion and shared food bring them closer to tenuous camaraderie. Karen can’t help but look between the three of  them, knocking elbows and knees, and wonder what they must have been in college. Maybe she’ll see. They’ll carry on into the morning, and into the next night, and the next. 

Matt says that they’re going to take Fisk down, and Karen doesn’t doubt it; Foggy might be their conscience, a fierce angel on their shoulders, but the rest of them won’t settle for less than blood.

 


End file.
